Bland Beginning (4 page)

The auctioneer tapped decorously with his hammer. “Sold at a hundred guineas to Mr –”

“Shelton, Anthony Shelton,” Anthony announced to the world with an enormous smile. The man in the blue suit stumbled past Anthony with his head down, and went out of the sales-room. There was a buzz of conversation. The old man leaned back and said, “You certainly paid through the nose –” Anthony waved him away. He felt like a book-buyer of long standing, and the feeling was enjoyable. “You may think so,” he said.

When he went to collect the book he was made aware that his experience as a book-buyer was in fact small. It would be necessary, the auctioneer’s clerk explained, to wait a couple of days for a cheque to be cleared. Unless, of course, he liked to pay cash.

“But I haven’t got that much on me in cash.”

The clerk shrugged. “Then I’m afraid you’ll have to wait, sir.” He glanced at the clock. “The banks are still open.”

Anthony considered. Now that he had bought the book he wanted to give it to Vicky immediately. “All right. I’ll go to the bank and come back.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll see that they’re all ready for you when you return.”

“They?” Anthony said in surprise, and was embarrassed when the clerk pointed towards the pile of Henry James. “Oh yes,” he said. “No. I mean – I don’t want to take those. Just the other – the little book.”

“Just the Rawlings,” said the clerk with a look that indicated his low opinion of Anthony.

“Just the Rawlings.”

Half an hour later he returned, collected the copy of
Passion and Repentance
, and gave instructions for the set of Henry James to be sent to his father.

While he ate lunch at the Criterion he thought about his purchase. The more he thought about it the more convinced he was that he had made a fool of himself. He put aside the copy of
Antic Hay
which he had been trying to read (“It is the very latest thing,” Vicky had said. “It will be so good for you.” But he detested it), and very carefully took out the little blue book and looked at it. “A hundred
guineas
,” he murmured. The fact that it was guineas seemed to make it more than five pounds worse than a hundred pounds. He opened the book and began to read:

When my lips touched your forehead they knew guilt.

But ah! Who does not relish guilt? Beneath

Your willing flesh my spirit laid a wreath

On hope of Heaven and – how gaily – built

Its nook in hell. So when we danced, “How sweet,”

I said, “that arabesque upon your dress.”

Later I fingered each black curling tress

And knew your carcass – so much worthless meat.

Ah, bitter, fruitful, all too fruitful days!

Within the dark who knows what deeds are done

Except the Future brings all dark to light.

From youth I craved the poet’s crown of bays

And still methinks that prize might have been won –

But now past sin crawls loathsomely to light.

“Too much for me, this stuff,” Anthony muttered to himself. His attention wandered, and he looked at his watch. It would take three-quarters of an hour to drive out to Barnsfield in the Bentley. Vicky did not expect him until teatime, and teatime, in the Rawlings home, was five o’clock. Middlesex were playing Surrey at Lord’s. He pondered these three facts slowly as he drank his coffee. Two lines of worry creased his forehead. Surely, he argued to himself, the purchase of
Passion and Repentance
represented culture and devotion enough for one day? But still he felt quite broken by the weight of the decision he was making, and the knowledge that Vicky would disapprove of it. Almost mournfully, he walked out of the Criterion, and directed the Bentley’s bonnet towards Lord’s. As he drew nearer to the St John’s Wood ground, however, his spirits brightened at the prospect of seeing Hearne and Hendren. “I mustn’t be late to tea,” he thought as he drove in. “Whatever happens, I mustn’t be late to tea.”

Victoria Rawlings’ Diary

At ten o’clock that Monday night Victoria Rawlings retired to her bedroom on the pretext of a raging headache. Her mother and brother were both inclined to resent this early departure: her mother because she wanted to enlist Vicky’s aid in dealing with one of the crossword puzzles that had recently appeared in the more popular newspapers, and brother Edward because she robbed him of half the audience before which he could express his worries.

Edward Rawlings was a professional worrier; or (to use a more modern term) he suffered from a deep anxiety neurosis. He worried about politics, about money, about his family and about his practice. He worried because the Liberal Party, which he supported, did not use its Parliamentary position to defeat the Labour Government; he worried because the practice which he had inherited on his father’s death showed a slight but persistent decline; he worried because his mother was an expense, and because his sister was unmarried; he worried lest his professional diagnoses should have been incorrect or his prescriptions wrongly written out. At the age of twenty-eight Edward’s hair was thinning, doubtless from worry about his own health, and his bank balance was thinning too. On that particular evening he had expressed a good deal of mental perturbation about old Mrs Browder, who suffered from indigestion – or it might be something worse. Suppose that she was right in thinking she had some severe internal trouble… Edward, Vicky reflected, grew more tiresome, and her mother more inconsequent, every day. How delightful it would be when she was married and away from both of them.

When she thought of the word
marriage
, Vicky sat down at an elegant but slightly rickety kidney-shaped writing desk in her small bedroom. Her mouth fell open and her expression became slightly vacant. Like her mother, Victoria Rawlings was long and slim and had dark hair, and if her mouth was a little too wide, and her eyes too far apart, for beauty, she was certainly extremely attractive. Now she sat at the writing desk in her bedroom that was ornamented by a rather odd collection of prints from the Medici Society, including two Holman Hunts and a luscious Tuke, and thought about marriage. She delved in the neck of her dress and fished up two small keys. With one of them she unlocked one drawer of the writing desk, and revealed a great red book with an imposing brass lock on it. With some difficulty, Vicky bent her swan-like neck until she could undo the brass lock with the other tiny key. The big red book was the diary in which Vicky recorded, in a manner that seemed to her vivid and lifelike, the events and reflections of her days. It was not every day that she found material worthy of record, but tonight she was almost embarrassed because she had so much of importance to tell. She took up her fountain pen with its Relief nib, turned to an open page – and paused. It was her custom to begin with some philosophical reflections before getting down to facts. What should it be tonight? Absently she scratched the tip of her nose with the nib of her pen, leaving a small violet mark on it, and then began to write in a remarkably round and unformed script:

“Certain things, dear diary, have always been a mystery to me. I have never understood how so many girls, of such different kinds, could fall in love with Lord Byron. I know, of course, that he was supposed to be awfully fascinating in his manner, and very beautiful, and that would have appealed to me, though he was
fat
, I believe, which I could never have endured; but the thing is that he was
lame.
I know it’s an awful thing to confess, but I’ve never been able to bear any kind of physical deformity. I just can’t bear to look at a cripple or anyone who’s lost an arm or leg, I’m almost sick at the smell of a hospital, and although I don’t actually faint at the sight of blood I feel as if I could. Even the smells that sometimes come out of brother Edward’s little dispensary make me feel that he must be very insensitive, or he couldn’t endure to make such vile mixtures.

“Well! I’ve always thought that this feeling was just a part of what it means to have an artistic temperament. After all, it stands to reason if you’re specially sensitive to beauty (as I am – though brother Edward is always so beastly and common about it) you’ll be specially sensitive to ugliness too. I don’t see anything to be ashamed of in that. And I’ve always said to everybody that what I love about Tony, for instance, is that he’s so beautiful. Really, it makes me tremble to look at him, with those wonderful golden curls and great shoulders and perfect figure. And I’ve always felt that anyone I fell in love with
must
be physically beautiful. Today, though – but I must begin at the beginning.”

Vicky looked at what she had written with her head on one side. She took great pleasure in reading the back pages of her diary, and often reflected that it was a great pity she couldn’t just read it without being put to the trouble of writing. The Relief nib skimmed over the paper.

“I went to the Barnsfield Art School this afternoon to hear a lecture from Professor Lester. They say he is very advanced and I expected somebody young and dashing and altogether
revolutionary
, but he was really a dry old fellow, and kept talking about something called significant form, which I couldn’t make head or tail of. I was at a loose end today because Tony had been awfully mysterious about his actions and said he wouldn’t be free until teatime. I suspected that he meant to go to a horrid
cricket match
– though I did him an injustice.

“But, anyway, I wasn’t in a very good temper when I left the lecture, and I was really furious when I got home and found that Mother had invited Colonel Stone and his nephew to tea. Of course, Mother had asked Colonel Stone so that she could flirt with him – really it is
too
awful the way she makes eyes at this retired Anglo-Indian type (positively out of
Kipling)
, who has no finer feelings of any kind. But what made me really cross was that Mother typically had told the maid nothing about there being two extra for tea, although she knows that both brother Edward and Anthony have appetites like horses. When I got home she was sitting on a sofa reading a slushy novel and eating chocolates. How she keeps her figure with all the chocolates she eats is a mystery to me. Mother saw that I was annoyed so she told me, with a kind of horrid leer to indicate that it was news which might be specially interesting to me, that the Colonel’s nephew, who had come down to stay with him, was a writer. I received this information coldly. When I asked her his name, she said that it was Kettering – although it turned out to be Basingstoke. Not that either of them meant anything more than a railway station to me.

“I just had time to go up and change into a new dress (my rather nice green frock with a pleated skirt and really
very
short, but there you are, they’re getting shorter and shorter and what can you do?), and when I got down they’d arrived. The Colonel’s always said to be a bit deaf, so I bellowed good afternoon to him and he got up – a bit stiff because of his corsets – and introduced his nephew, John Basingstoke. I saw as the nephew got up to shake hands that he was tall and lean and dark, and I thought from his expression in profile that he looked rather supercilious. Then he turned his head and I got an awful shock, because there was a thick white scar marking the right side of his face. It moved in a semicircle from his ear to a point just below his mouth.

“And yet in spite of this terrible scar – just the kind of thing which generally I simply can’t
endure –
there was something awfully attractive about him in a sort of gloomy Byronic way. And he had a beautiful voice (I’m very sensitive to voices), rich and deep and resonant.”

Vicky put down her pen again and summoned that face to mind – unsmiling, slightly frightening, and yet somehow not repulsive.

“I sat and talked to him about books and poetry and things until Anthony arrived, really
very
late.”

She went over again in her mind those minutes before Anthony’s arrival, and rediscovered her own embarrassment at the ghastly floater she had made. There was her mother telling Colonel Stone about the difficulty of running a doctor’s household, tinkling a little brass bell for tea and murmuring something (on a warm day in May with the grate empty) about muffins under a silver cover, the kettle on the hob and toast made in front of the fire. There was the tea, not toast and muffins, but bread and butter and jam and little home-made cakes, coconut and plain. And there was she, saying with rather surprising timidity to this scarred young man: “Are you staying here long, Mr Basingstoke?” and he replied: “You must ask my uncle,” and went on to explain, with a frankness almost as distressing as his scar, that he was completely broke. What a strange thing to say! The queen of the salon would have an answer to it, no doubt – but what? “I hear you write,” she said, and regretted the remark as soon as it was made, especially when he responded with an unencouraging monosyllable. But having begun she must go on. “You’ll think me awfully ignorant, but – what sort of things?”

He kept the good side of his face turned towards her and said gravely, “I have published a book of poems which sold exactly sixty-five copies, and I have in the press a novel which may sell a hundred and fifty.”

She wrinkled her forehead. “But that’s not very profitable.”

“Precisely. Hence my visit to my uncle.” He seemed to feel that he had been a little abrupt, and added, “I admire your grandfather’s early poems a great deal.”

The remark fell into a pause in the conversation, and was heard by Colonel Stone. “Poetry,” he said suddenly. “Don’t let this young feller start talking about poetry to you, Miss Rawlings. Talk till the cows come home, and you can’t understand a word he says. Waste of time, poetry – don’t you think so?” He turned abruptly to Mrs Rawlings, but the question was beyond her. She poised the sugar-tongs and said archly, “Two lumps, Colonel?”

“Thank you. When I was a young man people used to write real poetry – stuff you could
sing
.” Sitting with upright back the Colonel chanted: